One of the goals of The Wizard of UX is to promote awareness of UX issues, and one way of doing that is through examples, both good and bad.  This week's example is bad.  Take a look at this snippet from an ATT wireless page, and figure out which of the three numbers to call for customer service.

The first thing I have to decide is whether I have an ATT device or one from the former ATT Wireless.  How would a customer decide between these two extremely similar choices?  In my case, I know that my service is from ATT Wireless and that was called Cingular when I got my phone.  Does that help?  Only if I remember that ATT Wireless became Cingular and then ATT Wireless again.  In that case I might figure out that the former ATT Wireless means before it became Cingular, and therefore the first option is for after it became Cingular or after it became ATT Wireless again.

Whoever wrote this knew all the history, but forgot that most of his customers do not.

How could they have done better?  How about this?

This does a pretty good job of using terminology the customer can understand.  In particular, dates are something at everyone understands, and even for those who don't remember the date, they can probably make a pretty good guess.  Also, throwing in Cingular will help some customers remember.

For some customers, there is still the problem of determining whether their phone is TDMA, GSM or GPRS.  For this, they could have a pop-up window explaining how to tell the difference.  Better yet, for all choices, they could ask for the phone number, look it up in their records, and display only the right answer.  By the way, I was signed in when I captured this, so they already had all the information necessary to tell me exactly which number to call.  I can guarantee this, because on a previous screen they told me what kind of phone I have.